Concert Jan. 30 to Present Compositions by Local University Composers

Date: 01/16/07
Contact: Marc Lebovitz

A concert of new and recent works by Illinois State University and Illinois Wesleyan University music faculty will take place at 8 p.m. Tuesday, Jan. 30, in Illinois State's Kemp Recital Hall. Admission is free and open to the public. The concert is part of the Charles W. Bolen Faculty Recital Series.

ISU composers' pieces, all of which are premieres, are by Martha Horst and David Feurzeig (both composition professors), Matthew Smith (who teaches digital electronic composition in the Arts Technology program) and William Koehler (professor of bass). The composition by Illinois Wesleyan Professor David Vayo had its premiere in 1993. The performers Tuesday will be Illinois State School of Music faculty as well as guest cellist Nick Dinnerstein of Boston and New York City.

"This is an exciting opportunity to hear a real range of styles, and to find out what a wide range of musical personalities are here on campus and composing," said Feurzeig, who put the program together. "In the last 10 to 20 years, the idea of so-called 'serious' or 'concert' new music has really opened up. In a university composition concert 20 years ago you could expect to hear a fairly narrow stylistic range, all variants of a fairly extreme modernist aesthetic. Nowadays this sort of modernism is just one of many possibilities, ranging from neo-traditional tonal styles to groove- and sample-based electronic composition."

Martha Horst's Rhapsody for Two, will be performed by ISU students Carmen Hawkins, flute, and Jessica Boese, clarinet. Horst taught at San Francisco State, East Carolina University and University of California, Davis, (from which she has her Ph.D.) prior to joining the Illinois State faculty. Her recent honors include winning the 2005 Alea III International Composition Competition, winning of the Rebecca Clarke International Composition Competition and residency at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, the oldest artist colony in the U.S.

Feurzeig's Sonata for unaccompanied cello will be performed by Dinnerstein and was inspired by one of his performances attended by Feurzeig two years ago. Feurzeig has won numerous awards for his music, including the Hugh MacColl and Thomas Hoopes prizes from Harvard University, the Dresden Chamber Chorus International Composition Competition, the Frank Huntington Beebe traveling fellowship, the John James Blackmore prize, the Silver Medal of the Royal Academy of Arts (London) and the AD White teaching fellowship at Cornell University, from which Feurzeig earned his doctorate.

Smith's composition will involve the performance of predetermined sonic materials with some level of improvisation. Most sounds are sampled from pre-existing music, but then altered on the computer. Sounds will be manipulated and combined via knobs and keys on controllers that are connected to a laptop. He is a Ph.D. graduate of Keio University in Japan and was technical director at The Bregman Electronic Music Studios at Dartmouth before coming to Illinois State.

Koehler's composition is titled Suite for Clarinet and Double Bass and presents a choice of intervals in its original motive which then gives rise to many new motives presented through the rest of the piece. Koehler, who is very active as an educator and performer, just released his second CD, "Vandana Journey2gether," with table virtuoso Manpreet Bedi, as well as a new book titled A Guide to the Developmental Process of Improvisation and Composition. As an instrumentalist, he has performed throughout the U.S., in Europe and Russia, and with many notable jazz musicians.

"Wings" by David Vayo premiered at the 1993 Norfolk Chamber Music Festival. Head of Wesleyan's composition department, Vayo has received awards and compositions for the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, ASCAP, the Koussevitzky Music Foundations, the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, among others, as well as the Illinois Council for the Arts. There have been more than 300 performances and broadcasts of his compositions including recent performances in Mexico, Japan, the Netherlands, Finland and France.

Only two weeks after the Jan. 30 recital, Feurzeig will present the School of Music's first "Ragtime and Stride" Minority Scholarship Benefit Lecture-Concert at 7:30 p.m. in the Center for the Performing Arts Concert Hall. Feurzeig, who is presenting the event in honor of Black History Month, is known for his informative lecture and entertaining performance of ragtime and stride piano. Stride piano is in the jazz idiom, but followed and was influenced by ragtime, the first truly American musical genre.